Life hangs by a (2m) thread...

13th June 2020

Peter Gray-Read shares his thoughts on the subject of 'Our life hangs on a thread...'

We all know what a metre looks like now…  Well, we know if we go a thousand times smaller, we get a mm – I know a lot of schools have closed – but we know what a millimetre looks like.  Well, if we go a thousand times smaller than a millimetre, we get a micrometre (0.000001m).  So, if we take less than half of that we get the wavelength of blue light - 0.4um or 400 nanometres.  Well, I want to tell you, your life hangs on a thread two hundred – YES 200 times thinner than THAT!   A DNA molecule.   It takes two hundred DNA molecules lined up side by side to equal the wavelength of blue light the smaller end of the light spectrum
 
Humm…  life hands on a thread!  You can say that again.  Perhaps equally amazing – if you put the DNA in our chromosomes end to end you get a chain about 2 metres long – and we ALL know what 2m looks like!!
 
I can get a hedge trimmer lead knotted up without trying… imagine 2m of thread  200 x thinner than the wavelength of light.  Try and untangle that in a hurry…  Yet our cells make millions of copies of that molecule an hour and ‘know’ exactly where in that length to find the sequence to make more copies of haemoglobin or insulin or actin and myosin the muscle proteins… that is some filing system
 
Yes, we know that DNA stores our instructions, our blueprints – but sometimes we need to stop and consider...  Over twenty thousand genes perfectly copied (99.999% of the time), perfectly regulated, and often dispersed in several segments which have to be joined up when they need to be expressed, i.e. copied to make the proteins that do the work in our bodies
 
These genes are expressed at the right time in the right place and we are supposed to teach our kids it all happened by chance!!!  I’m not prepared to lie and rob God of the glory due to His name…  I hope you won’t
 

image courtesy of https://pixabay.com

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